Bulgaria’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikolay Mladenov has censured the current “mass hysteria” concerning the immigration debate in the UK.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Friday, Mladenov said the warnings issued by some British media outlets about an influx of eastern European migrants to the UK have been “driven by the far-right political agenda.”

He also dismissed as “politically-motivated” claims of a possible surge in the number of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to Britain in 2014 following the reversal of working restrictions on migrants from poor countries in the European Union (EU).

Referring to the media’s anti-immigration rhetoric, the former Bulgarian top diplomat said, “This whole mass hysteria, which has been fanned out by some media outlets in the UK, has been purely politically motivated and that there is no reason to believe that the UK will be swarmed by waves of immigrants from Bulgaria”.

The criticism came after transitional controls were lifted on January 1, allowing Bulgarian and Romanian citizens to without restrictions across the EU. The transitional controls were imposed on the two by some EU states when they joined the bloc in 2007.